I remember once writing a long book about Paris; a long, long book, to pay my first quarter's rent as a young man. And in that book I found myself perpetually saying "North" when I meant "South" in the matter of the immortal hill--in the matter of the hill of the University. I always talked of going up that hill as going "North," whereas if you go up that hill you walk due South.
And I knew a man once who whenever he went into a shop to buy razor blades for his patent razor always said "railway blades." Yet in other respects he was an ordinary man.
I will not attempt to solve the problem. It is not fatigue that does it, still less is it real ignorance; for you will notice that a man is inaccurate about things he knows thoroughly well, and that the mistakes he makes are always of an absurd kind which he would be the first to spot in others; for instance, calling Nottingham Northampton, and the other way about. All one can say is that it happens as variations happen in the generation of animals, or as any other fluke happens. Some God guides it.
Inaccuracy is a very fruitful and powerful creator of things. It not only creates legends, it creates words. There are hosts and crowds of words which have come in through the talent of men for inaccuracy and through the inspiration of inaccuracy, which is blown into men by this God of whom I speak. Hence what is called _metathesis_, the very fruitful parent of many admirable words from Turmut to Hercules. Hence also the naturalisation of French and other foreign words. It is a pity, I think, that so much printing, and the foolish pride of those who can read, checks the process nowadays. I live in hopes that it will not check the process for long, and that our coming barbarism will return to these popular words.
"Chauffeur" should be "shover," and "asparagus"--which I like to hear called "grass"--has, I hope, taken root forever as "sparrow-grass"--a very good name for it; for it is a grass and sparrows have no particular bond with it. They well might have, if they only knew how good it was; but they are stupid little beasts, and good for nothing. And if you tell me that thus to branch off upon the matter of sparrows is disturbing to the reader, and that one ought to keep the main thread of one's discourse, I answer you with a book always well praised and in parts quite on the highest level, called "The Book of Job." If you will read "The Book of Job" you will find that, in the catalogue of strange beasts which the writer brings forward in defence of the majesty of God, he gets to the ostrich. But hardly has he mentioned the ostrich when the inane habits of that enormous fowl prove too much for him. He forgets all about God and creation and the rest of it, and allows himself a little separate diatribe against the idiocy of the ostrich before getting back to his theology. So I with sparrows.
